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Date:	Mon, 7 Jun 2010 11:23:56 +0200
From:	Michael Ludwig <milu71 AT gmx DOT de>
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	Unicode/UTF-8 support (MinTTY) - ncursesw - Mutt, Vim
Message-ID:	<20100607092355.GB3028@wladimir>
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After having used rxvt without Unicode support for years, the other
day I discovered MinTTY, which does support UTF-8 - very nice!

The occasional Greek or Cyrillic letters showing up in mails will no
longer be displayed as "?" or "??" in the Mutt mail reader, I thought.
Same story for editing with Vim.

Not quite, though. There are display and editing problems in both
programs. From reading, I believe this is due to their being linked to
ncurses instead of ncursesw ("w" for "wide characters"), as shown by
ldd:

  $ ldd $(which vim) | grep curses
        cygncurses-10.dll => /usr/bin/cygncurses-10.dll (0x69580000)
  $ ldd $(which mutt) | grep curses
        cygncurses-8.dll => /usr/bin/cygncurses-8.dll (0x6c180000)

Is this assessment correct, and complete in that this is the defining
reason for the display problems?

The wide-character ncursesw was announced in January:

  This is the first official release of ncurses compiled to support wide
  characters, and can be installed simultaineously with the "narrow"
  ncurses package(s).

http://www.mail-archive.com/cygwin-announce AT cygwin DOT com/msg03179.html

It sounds like Unicode is the preferred way now:

  Actually, I'd prefer if people started using -I/usr/include/ncursesw
  and linking against the wide version of the library instead.

http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2010-05/msg00465.html

People seem to have had success compiling Mutt with ncursesw:

http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=124

Are ncursesw versions of Vim and Mutt imminent? Or is it not going to
happen anytime soon?

-- 
Michael Ludwig

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